The Place of Quantum Physics

It’s fitting that The Physics of Sorrow is ending with a lesson in quantum dynamics. While the previous section—Global Autumn—started the discussion of possibilities, as Gospodinov continued to rewrite earlier themes in a more transparent way, the entire book has been rooted in the complexity of what is seen and what isn’t—ideas at the heart of quantum physics.

Gospodinov established this relationship between light and time through the Minotaur as a thematic anchor. He highlighted the importance between the dark labyrinth that the Minotaur wandered and the moment of his death as Theseus drags him into the light to be gutted. Additionally, children were hidden to keep them safe, whether those safe places were the stomachs of their parents, barns or basements. Time capsules, whether buried deep in the earth or shot into the dark of space, contained a moment frozen in time for those who would crack them open and look upon their contents. And, building upon time capsules, memories—now in the form of stories—could be saved in the light. In these shelters, hidden away from light, people and objects were safe from the gazes of others and, were safe, as we come to learn in this section, from certainty.

And issues of possibility and certainty are at the forefront throughout this last section (and the Epilogue). In “Quanta of Equivocation” Gospodinov provides a set of key ideas to read the rest of this section—and arguably the rest of the book. The first explains a basic principle of quantum physics.

According to the Copenhagen interpretation, as early as the 1920s quanta act like particles only when we observe them. The rest of the time, hidden from our gaze, they are part of a scattered and supposedly disinterested wave, in which we don’t know exactly what’s going on. Everything there is possible, unforeseeable and variable. But once they sense we’re watching them, they instantaneously start acting as we expect them to, orderly and logically.

And the other statement on the nature on how what we don’t see behaves.

The world behind our backs is some kind of undefined quantum soup, says a Stanford physicist—but the second you turn around, it freezes into reality. I like that definition and never turn around too abruptly.

And, finally, a statement on the nature of possibility regarding the two previous rules.

That which has not been told, just like that which has not happened—because they’re of the same order—possesses all possibilities, countless variations on how they could happen or be told.

Gospodinov has constructed reality within The Physics of Sorrow that relies on being witnessed. Things that light shine on—things that are seen—are then seen are set, while things left in the dark are timeless and uncertain. While next week I’ll approach these transformations between uncertainty and certainty in more detail, this idea is evident in the contrast between the Prologue and the Epilogue.

Burnt at Both Ends

I’m drawn to a familiar mindscape from March when we first dove into this piece for the Two Month Review. I was frantically flipping through the pages trying to construct a suitable sample to have something large, unwieldy, but vaguely accurate to say about the piece in the introductory blog post. I noted the shifting voices, the short sections, the diagrams, and lists and started to drown—in a good way— with the many directions that Gospodinov was guiding us through my own interpretation of the novel. I walked away—from the sampling—feeling something I’ve only said about a few projects: a book didn’t suit the content and form of the book.

Originally, I described something along the lines of a hallucinatory nightmare in a sensory deprivation tank—a description I feel (and hope) Gospodinov would appreciate—as a way to better experience The Physics of Sorrow, something haunting yet phenomenologically exhaustive. But as the novel ends and I meet that brilliant clash of red and yellow and flip the cover back over to that broken Minotaur, I need to return to my beginning recant some of my original comments.

Alongside the most arrogant interpretation to my original comments, Gospodinov accepts, acknowledges, and addresses the limitations of a book for the novel, and this acceptance is rooted in his decisions on how the piece ends. We see this through the end mirroring the start. If you’d recall, the prologue to The Physics of Sorrow opened up with a series of short profiles on births and lifetimes—some clearly human, others not, and a few left with very little to identify.

On closing, Gospodinov returns us to these entities at their moment of death, which breaks the sense of infinite possibilities that this section has explored through the discussion of quantum physics and developing alternate takes on so much. This cap to the book closes the chances of this going on forever but still reaffirms the obsession that Gospodinov has expressed towards collecting memories, collecting fragments, and exploring possibilities.

Redefining: Last Lengths of the Spiral

As we approach the end of the piece we meet a singularity of ideas as elements we’ve encountered start to collapse upon themselves. Collapse shouldn’t read as a pejorative but as the experience of a reader approaching the end of a world that an author has built for them. The collapse exists solely in our experience as readers as the hot white expanse of the final blank pages is soon upon us. But while all novels—at least the good ones that try to end—come to an end, The Physics of Sorrow, with it’s unique form and approach to its content, makes the fact that it will end significant.

If my obsession with spirals has illuminated anything its that Gospodinov has created a form in The Physics of Sorrow that allows it to continue as long as there are pages to carry it. As long as light shines upon ideas, people, cities, and the transformation of these elements over time The Physics of Sorrow is a constant longing for an empty expanse. With each page, each story, and each section, we learn more and more on the complexity of this work as Gospodinov drags us from across realities and redefines the ideas that we’ve become accustomed to with each leap. And even so close to the end, there’s still more to learn about the universes we’ve inhabited and the rules that guide them.

Alleys, Corridors, Cities, Labyrinths

This section, as the spiral dictates, expresses another re-imagining of a previously established idea and provides further insight into the rules of The Physics of Sorrow. “Labyrinth and Choice” guides us through this. At its simplest, it describes narrator Gospodinov traversing the heart of Paris, and as he loses his place and starts to panic and regret every decision he makes he works towards the ideological core of the labyrinth in this work.

The time when I stood between two streets, wondering which one to go down. Both of them would have led me to the place I was looking for. Incidentally, there was nothing particularly unusual about the streets in and of themselves. The problem was, as always, no matter which one I chose, I would lose the other one.

What follows is Gospodinov’s attempt to experience both paths, but, as he’s already speculated about choosing one path, as one attempts to navigate both there will always be one collection of decisions untouched. He directly addresses the impossibility of this through the science of quantum physics, writing, “I could only have been satisfied in that quantum physics experiment that shows how a particle also acts like a wave, passing through two openings at once.”

The spiral of this work is formed by Gospodinov—again either narrator or author—attempting to have gone down multiple paths. Of course, this still means that there are numerous paths that we, as readers, cannot experience, as his decision to go down one path locks us away from experiencing another. With that futility considered, as we read through The Physics of Sorrow and continually encounter new approaches, interpretations, and constructions of the same ideas, Gospodinov has almost given us the closest to a quantum experience that we as readers can through a novel. That process is almost laid out here:

I headed down one of them, the street to the right, but I was thinking about the other one the whole time. And with every step, I kept repeating to myself that I had made the wrong choice. I hadn’t gone even a third of the way before I stopped decisively (oh, that decisive gesture of indecisiveness) and turned down an alley toward the other street. Of course, hesitation seized me with the first couple steps and again after a few meters, I practically ran down the next alley to the first street. And then again, seized by hesitation—back to the other one, then back to the first. To this day I don’t know whether with that zigzag I gained both streets or lost them both.

But while the narrator may have lost access to one path, the author and reader haven’t. Through each encounter with a repeated idea, we’re gaining yet another path each time. The form of this novel, that originally came to me as a spiral as I read through reinterpretations of the same idea, now feels like a span of spirals across dimensions—each arc being drawn from various quantum paths into one spiral with a clear start and end through its physical form in a book.

With this in mind, we see how author Gospodinov layers our encounters with his constants—the minotaurs, myth, loss, and abandonment, and, in this case, even labyrinths—yet varies them as we experience multiple paths. With this stylistic strategy he’s given us a quantum building of his own work.

In particular this piece redefines the labyrinth.

The most oppressive thing about the labyrinth is that you are constantly being forced to choose. It isn’t the lack of an exit, but the abundance of “exits” that is so disorienting. Of course, the city is the most obvious labyrinth.

We’re left to unravel our sense of cities and labyrinths that Gospodinov constructed for us in previous stories—in previous sections—as he’s given us yet another quantum path to explore. We’ve encountered numerous cities throughout this work, as a whole, and now, with only one section left, we have yet another way to approach them. And labyrinths aren’t the only idea in this section revisited in this quantum way.

The Doctor’s Humorous Diagnosis

Throughout The Physics of Sorrow we’ve encountered moments where Gospodinov attempts to understand the nature of his afflictions. His family recognized the physical manifestation of his embedding, with his body stiffening and his eyes resting lazily on objects in the room. He’s even gone to medical professionals, finally receiving a diagnosis for his condition—a name both the narrator and I can no longer accurately recall. As the narrator aged, his closeness with the condition that almost single-handedly defined our experience with the book diminished as well. With the timely death of this element—which if drawn out for too long could have survived as a gimmick in a weaker piece—we’re left with the natural reading experience dictated by Gospodinov, as either author or narrator.

This section provides another moment with doctors and diagnoses. With this instance in “Advice from the Nineteenth Century” Gospodinov has been diagnosed with stagnant bile.

Your bile is stagnant, you see sorrow in everything, you are drenched in melancholy, my friend the doctor said.

Isn’t melancholy something from previous centuries? Isn’t there some vaccine against it yet, hasn’t medicine taken care of it yet? I ask.

There’s never been as much melancholy as there is today, the doctor said with a throaty laugh. They just don’t advertise it. It’s not marketable, melancholy doesn’t sell [. . .]

Greek medicine—which experienced a resurgence of popularity across Europe in later centuries—had a “humor” based approach to health. The four humors—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—determined the physical and emotional wellbeing of an individual and shifted between stagnancy, excitement, abundance, scarcity, and so on. In this case, the doctor’s diagnosis of stagnant bile and melancholy likely reflects a problem with Gospodinov’s black bile. But while issues with black bile can lead to melancholy—and The Physics of Sorrow easily contains a deep sadness that Gospodinov negotiates—yellow bile is responsible for more manic, or choleric, behaviors.

While Gospodinov may be consumed by melancholy to a degree, a build-up of yellow bile accounts for this work being in front of us at this point. The effort to build a time capsule, to create lists, to buy stories from strangers, and similar behaviors reflect a tenacity within himself to not allow the darkness of the world to wash over him, but rather gets him up at the right time of the day to slip on waders and dredge.

But getting back to the point, I’ll recommend something to you that you’ll say is straight out of the nineteenth century: travel, stir up your blood, give your eyes new sights, go south[.]

And Gospodinov has taken this advice to heart throughout this work. Travelling takes many forms for Gospodinov as traverses a geographic world while buying up stories and recording his own experiences in thoughtful narratives like “Howl” in this section. But he also explores an ideological globe as he combs through philosophies throughout space and time and gleans conclusions—read ‘remedies’—to what ails him and the world at large. Through this, we see yet another balance between the humours: narrator Gospodinov with both an energy to explore and record the world but who also affected by its contents—just not enough to be fully consumed.

And this section is like many others that developed a psychological profile for narrator Gospodinov. Early on we learned of embedding as a purely magical ability, only to have a psychological and neurological capacity developed to understand it. And as he aged, and his ability to embed was compromised, he found new ways to satisfy this cornerstone of himself through collecting stories. And now, as the spiral continues to wind, we’re provided with yet another way to understand narrator Gospodinov—we’re provided with yet another path to go down.

Lists of the Apocalypse

And even in the light—or rather the darkness of the end, the lists that Gospodinov has constructed gain a new understanding with another approach. We’ve seen lists throughout the piece, from erotic experiences in Communist Bulgaria to collections of consumed children in myth, but they gained an additional importance through the “Time Bomb [. . .]” section of The Physics of Sorrow where they served as condensed inventories in the event of annihilation.

If you recall, I noted a confluence of form and content in the blog post for that particular section as the The Physics of Sorrow, which contained fragments of larger things, took the form of a time capsule which sought to protect the contents of one time for another. As we learned of narrator Gospodinov’s time growing up with a threat of nuclear annihilation, seeing The Physics of Sorrow as a time capsule seemed practically rooted in the idea that Gospodinov, both as narrator and author, was attempting to collect and save things for a physical sense of a destruction wrought from something like nuclear war. Thusly, the lists throughout the piece possessed an additional importance. And with yet another approach in this section, their importance continues to grow.

In “Lists and Oblivion” we come to understand annihilation by different terms.

I rush to write everything down, to gather it up in my notebook, just as they rush to bring in the lambs before the thunderstorm whips up. My memory for names and faces is fading ever more quickly. That’s the most likely explanation. That’s how my father’s illness was at the end. Somebody with a big eraser came and started rubbing everything out, moving backward. First, you forget what happened yesterday, the most distant, out-of-the-way stuff is the last to go. In this sense, you always die in your childhood.

I’m writing this section with my heart racing as I go over this short narrative again. Gospodinov started us with this idea. “There is only childhood and death,” and now the epigraphy reaches far from those early pages for our narrator’s father, and narrator Gospodinov fears that this will also be his fate. As an isolated experience, this collapse as the pages run thin is very well upon us. In an expanded sense, the apocalypse that these lists are constructed and saved for is not entirely physical, but also mythic: erasure in an experiential sense. He continues:

My worst nightmare is that one day I will be standing just like that at some airport, the planes will land and take off, but I won’t be able to remember where I’m going. And worse yet, I’ll have forgotten the place I should return to. And there won’t be anyone to recognize me and bring me back home.

And with this speculation these lists serve as guideposts for the post-apocalyptic Gospodinov—now a time capsule to let him return to places and times lost to dementia or Alzheimer’s.

Gospodinov, the Reader

I had a longer section written for this blog post that I scrapped—foolishly, in retrospect—regarding the detail in the subjective accounts in both “Global Autumn”—this full section of the book—and throughout the novel as a whole. It addressed, hastily, the relationship between narrator Gospodinov and the nature of his very personal narratives. While his ability to embed started to diminish, I started to feel like the short, heavily detailed narratives—like “Howl” in this section—provided a window for a reader to embed in the memories of the narrator.

I quickly scrapped the idea because it felt too obvious: readers perform a similar embedding through the act of reading the experiences of others, which is further aided by a writer’s skill. But I was still marked with in interest due to the detail of these pieces and their ability to draw on multiple time periods and multiple philosophical tracks—the conflation of these elements guiding an individual to a very specific time with ideological, phenomenological, and geographic queues. Following the discussion of lists with narrator Gospodinov, my heart is wrenched by these implications, and I’m left wondering: in the time capsule of The Physics of Sorrow, are these hyper-subjective moments here for Gospodinov to return to following the possibility of annihilation?

Whatever the answer, the end is near.

The Nature of Writing

This section provides a moment of soberish reflection from Gospodinov as he discusses the nature of his craft. When we discussed Part IV.—Time Bomb (To be Opened After the End of the World)—I noted a confluence between content and form, as Gospodinov discussed time capsules in great detail. There it became clear that the formal qualities of The Physics of Sorrow mirrored the content of this specific discussion. Without entering the realm of meta commentary, Gospodinov lays many of the stylistic approaches to his work bare. But here in Part V.—The Story Buyer—we’re met with a more blunt author-to-reader discussion on the writing process: particularly the “purchasing” of stories. Formally The Physics of Sorrow is built in a way that allows for drastic shifts in tone, including moments of meta-commentary from Gospodinov.

During “The Story Buyer” Gospodinov explains the nature of this story buying:

In the past I could implant, now I’m forced to buy. I could introduce myself this way, too: I’m a person who buys up the past. [. . .] I go around buying up the past wholesale. Call me what you want, find me a name. Those who own land are called “landholders,” I’m a timeholder, a holder of others’ time, the owner of others’ stories and pasts. I’m an honest buyer, I never try to undercut the price. I only buy up private pasts, the pasts of specific people. Once they tried to sell me the past of a whole nation, but I turned it down[. . .] What’s in it for me? Thanks to an earlier illness and to the purchased stories, I could now move through the corridors of various times. I could have the childhood of everyone I had bought one from, I could possess their wives and their sorrows. I could pile them up in the Noah’s Boxes in that basement.

Here we have a blurring between a blunt address to readers regarding his writing process with an explanation that is still rooted within the metaphysical abilities established within The Physics of Sorrow. It’s clear that writers draw upon a variety of sources for their work—if you can recall Ernest Hemingway’s expanded epigraphy on the many people and places that he chose to exclude from his memoir—but these purchases allow narrator Gospodinov another opportunity to experience the embedding that he’s lost in adulthood. He also connects this process to many of the ideas of The Physics of Sorrow. The relationship between time and light is apparent here as the process of “timeholding” is related to bringing these stories to light through purchasing them. If he didn’t purchase them, they would remain in the darkness of a labyrinth. Additionally, he also draws back to the time capsule curating—the “Noah’s Boxes”—from Part IV.

The harrowing opening with “The Baby Carrier,” which highlights more of Gospodinov’s prosodic strength, ends with specific address from the author himself on his buying process:

I bought this story in late October, near the Greek border. When I offered her money, the woman looked at me in astonishment. She couldn’t figure out what exactly I was paying her for. I’ve got nothing to sell you, she said, plus I’m not gonna have any more kids. I replied that I had just bought her story. I’m not sure she understood. She took the money and turned it over in her hands, as if expecting me to ask for it back, then turned around, took a few steps, squatted down, and burst out sobbing. I thought to myself that only now had she begun to sell her children. When she started telling about them. Without a story, it was all nothing but business.

Telling stories is part of Judgment Day, because it makes people understand. But what the point of understanding is remains unclear. I put these stories in the box, too.

While I’m not sold on the truth of such a purchase actually happening to this degree, the idea behind collecting stories to transpose through prose and disseminate through publishing stands out as an accurate reflection of the writing profession. As I suggested earlier, a successful writing process is far more social than many of the old tropes of writers hunched over typewriters drunk and inspired. I think specifically to the popular image of Hemingway, but as was suggested through the expanded epigraph his work is drawn from the lives of those around him and the places he visited.

Even during the podcast last week, Brian discussed moments where people pitched (questionable) ideas for works to them. These are things they wouldn’t want to ‘buy’ in Gospodinov’s model. But, often enough, writers come across valuable works to ‘purchase’ throughout their lives, and this section layers its stories as a collection of curated purchases, mediated by sobered commentary on the act.

Furthermore, from this excerpt, we see another allusion to the time capsule curating from Part IV. Gospodinov writes, “[telling] stories is part of Judgment Day, because it makes people understand.” The blurring of writer and narrator Gospodinov leads to a complicated and bittersweet writing process. Purchasing and writing these stories allows satisfies this collective Gospodinov who is trying to relive the empathetic embedding that he’s lost with time, but also allows him to prepare the time capsule of The Physics of Sorrow for an impending apocalypse.

This discussion of story buying culminates in “The Story Seller” and “…And his Story,” where Gospodinov meets Salman Rushdie at a wedding. After some brilliant speculation from Gospodinov on the existence of celebrities, he and Rushdie have the following exchange:

I finally managed to get a word in. Writers are never innocent. They’re as thieving as magpies. Still, it’s important who steals from you.
But no, I gave him the story as a gift.
Well, then we’ll wait and see.
If you’d like, I could tell it to you, too.
I am curious. But you do understand that it is already sold.
Didn’t you say it was given as a gift?
Yes, that’s right . . . given, sold. We didn’t sign a contract. If you really like it, you just need to work out with him who’s going to use it. I’ll sell it . . . in exchange for two large Four Roses.
So, for eight roses, I laughed . . . Deal. (That’s how I met the story seller.) And after the first bouquet of roses landed on the table, the story began.

Again, while the bartering and bargaining compromises my full faith in the story, there is still a lot here regarding the writing process. The stories don’t just come from ‘civilians,’ but the sale or trade of them is complicated when another writer is involved. That being said, I appreciate how fair the interaction is portrayed, despite the difference in popular acclaim between the two authors. “…And His Story” then tells this story with a degree of commentary from Gospodinov, almost like he was sitting at his desk, writing it out, going over notes, and criticizing each line as he puts it to the page. But this pair of stories continues to highlight the important social nature of writing.

In retrospect, so much of this piece speaks to the social qualities of the writing process. Despite my focus on the confluence of form and content with the time capsule model, The Physics of Sorrow is a collection of narratives from multiple perspectives—this has been a guiding idea from the outset in the Epigraphy and Prologue. But through this section we get a stronger sense of Gospodinov’s intent with this project. Through the hyper empathy of embedding, or the later financial exchange of buying stories, Gospodinov has made it his goal to collect stories by any means necessary.

“And there’s the switch. The tiniest of switches”

Throughout last week’s Two Month Review blog post (and my raving scribbles through my copy of the book and my personal notebook) I expressed an interest in understanding The Physics of Sorrow as a spiral. I’ve been tempted at times to call the sections circular, or at least calling our experience of going from section to section circular, but it’s not entirely cyclical, where it would run over the same subject matter or stories. The circle doesn’t fit because we aren’t getting the same experiences in each section—we’re not just dealing with a slight variation on the played out Epic of Gilgamesh. The spiral form accounts for the overlapping subject matter—embedding, Minotaur, labyrinth, children, abandonment, etc.—with a developing narrative that lacks narrative repetition. So while we keep encountering these themes, we keep encountering them in different positions, at different times, in different ways, with different people. The spiral form also accounts for the philosophical treatises that we’re met with in each section that further complicate the myths and ideas at the heart of _The Physics of Sorrow. “The Green Box” continues as a testament to the spiral.

The section opens with “The Ear of the Labyrinth,” which beautifully reimagines a tragedy that took place in the town of Tafalla, Spain—an agricultural town known for their meat industry, I’d like to add. Along our spiral, the piece opens with an article describing an incident during 2010, when a bull, during a bullfight, leapt into the audience and injured 40 before it was eventually shot. While the opening is written in a standard journalistic style, Gospodinov embeds into the bull’s memory:

“[. . .] it turned out to be one of those exceptional events that launched me back into that forgotten “embedding” . . . Something I haven’t experienced in years.

As we learned in the previous section, embedding—the condition that escapes me as much as it escaped Gospodinov—became harder to experience with age. But as we learn now, particular things, like this event, drag him into memories again. And there’s more discussion of embedding within this section, but it’s not exactly what we’re used to. Through some of these stories, he performs some proxy embedding, where he deeply imagines the experiences of other creatures.

In “Through a Lamb’s Ear” he speculates about Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea being told from the perspective from a fish, twisting the classic line from the book to:

A marlin can be destroyed but not defeated.

Additionally, he includes a short and sweet snippet of dialog between two unidentified entities, who discuss history through plants:

“The history of the world can be written from the viewpoint of a cat, an orchid, or a pebble. Or lamb’s ear.”
“What’s lamb’s ear?”
“A plant.”
“And do you think we would figure in a history of the world written by lamb’s ear?”
“I don’t know. Do you think lamb’s ear figures in the history of the world written by people?”

This piece introduces us to what embedding could look like to an older Gospodinov reflecting on his lost ability and applying it to new situations. Before we would have gotten an expansive account of the marlin, and its life, and the battle with Santiago. Instead, we have a reserved reflection on speculation on such a possibility. But we do get another clear moment of embedding in “The Green Box,” aside from the bull looking for his ancestral mother.

With “The Minotaur’s Dream” readers experience, well, a first-person account of a Minotaur’s dream. In his dream, the Minotaur has become a fully human child:

I dream that I’m beautiful. Not exactly beautiful, but inconspicuous. That’s what it means to be beautiful, to be like everyone else. My head feels light. My eyes are on the front of my face. I have a nose, rather than nostrils. I have human skin, thin human skin. I walk down the street and no one notices me. Now that’s happiness—no one noticing me. It’s a happy dream.

And the Minotaur spends much of his day going throughout town, interacting delicately with townsfolk, if noticed at all. This all changes as night falls. As darkness consumes the sky, the Minotaur is slowly dragged back to his reality:

I can feel my jaw elongating, my skull growing heavy and hard, but I don’t want to hurt him. Thankfully the dream is coming to an end, since the situation is getting pretty desperate. That’s the moment in which dreams tear apart.

And with that he’s returned to the darkness of his labyrinth. This entire piece was written in the first person, just as previous moments of embedding. Only, here, Gospodinov has left us with no clue to how he was able to enter the dream, as he did in earlier embedding, especially considering the absence of consistent embedding as an adult.

Some Twists on the Labyrinth

Returning to the opening story for a moment takes us, yet again, through the Labyrinth that we’re familiar with from the other sections. As we follow Gospodinov’s embedding into the bull in Tafalla:

An amphitheater, of course, is a labyrinth. One of the most commonly found circular labyrinths, made of concentric circles intersected by transverse corridors.

It’s certainly a space that I wouldn’t consider labyrinthine at first thought, as I’m first dragged back to the intense lighting that floods event spaces like these. But, just as the bull here, my mind recedes for a moment: walking from the parking lot to the amphitheatre (stadium in my particular memory, but I feel the comparison is sustained), or being the sole member of your group that has to use the bathroom or procure concessions in the middle of an important inning, and you’re left to wander the halls alone—lights flickering alongside all other dramatic effects—turning corners that seem like you just passed them, perpetually. And just like that, trained well by the reading, as Tom noted during the podcast, I’m following Gospodinov as he transforms my familiar to his. Through each modification of the myth, we’ve learned to be complicit through each modification, agreeing to suspend our disbelief because everything is written so tightly and we’re inundated with variations to the point of accepting change—and sorrow—as the new normal. So for us, the readers, the amphitheater is now a labyrinth—a prison.

And this space transforms the bull, according to Gospodinov, as:

The bull lifted its gaze and recognized the Labyrinth—the ancestral home of his great-grandfather, the Minotaur. And since animals have no sense of time (just as children do not), the Bull saw his ancestral home and recognized the Minotaur within himself.

But this transformation of a space into a labyrinth occurs, with a twist, later in the section, as Gospodinov and his wife are expecting a child. “The End of the Minotaurs” stands as a beautiful reinterpretation of the myth we’ve gotten so accustomed to as readers:

Someone’s walking around inside me. Someone’s gotten lost in my belly. That’s what she said one winter afternoon, as we were sitting quietly in the room, trying to hear the snow piling up outside. It sounded beautiful and timeless. Lying back in the rocking chair, she had opened up Ancient Greek Myths and Legends and placed the book on top of the protruding oval of her belly, like a roof.

But as Gospodinov starts to ruminate of this reality, something strikes him. He starts to align the elements of his myths onto his life and is startled by the results:

That which was roaming around inside was not the Minotaur, but rather that which would kill him. Let’s call it “Theseus” for the sake of clarity. The umbilical cord is there inside like Ariadne’s thread. So then where is the Minotaur? The answer lay in the anxiousness of the inquiry. The Minotaur was me. Let’s turn that phrase around, so I can’t hide in its tail end. I was the Minotaur. Theseus—he, she, it (the gender doesn’t matter) – was coming to kill me with all the innocence of predestination. There was nowhere to hide, I could only meekly await his arrival.

Of course, Gospodinov, and his family, have all served as the minotaurs at particular points in their history—all trapped in their labyrinths, and subject to their own horrors—but now the labyrinth was a living person, his wife nevertheless, and in a kind of liberation (or new subjugation) his own flesh and blood is to be the hero in this new version of the myth. After all the time that Gospodinov spent locked in various labyrinths as the horrible Minotaur, he was now to face the hero that would slay him.

And it is this point that the bull in Tafalla leaps into the stands, people running in terror as he seeks his mother and his murderer, or at least a variant of him—the same point when Gospodinov looks into his vision of the future, sees the faces, and accepts the terms. But this angle of the myth is not the last that he twists in this section of the spiral.

Death by Another Face

The story in Tafalla hits us with another divergence from the typical narrative of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. We already have a bull, we have a crowd for an audience, and, in this iteration, we have a faceless killer where there has typically been the blessed, handsome hero Theseus. Gospodinov writes:

But the myth is repeatable and the death of the Minotaur has to happen again. [. . .] Death catches up with him right when he seems to have caught sight of a familiar shoulder and locks of hair hurrying away. It’s the first time they kill him that way. From a distance. Without a sword or a spear. Without seeing his killer’s face.

Gospodinov has taken a myth, made it more tragic by humanizing the ‘monster’ and, now, goes a step further by taking the myth and truly making it modern by having this contemporary Theseus kill the enthralled minotaur at a distance, with a rifle, without the two coming face to face.

But this faceless murder of those deemed animals is the truly modern face of slaughter, and Gospodinov addresses this voraciously. “Without a Face” creates a history to address the transition from face-to-face to faceless murders, starting with several mythic slayings and ending with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

As an aside—from a craft standpoint—it’s important to note that many of these sections bleed into one another, like we’ve found a corner of the labyrinth that we handed guided our hands over before, or another length of the spiral that veers off at a slightly sharper angle than before—whatever metaphor you prefer. “The Ear of the Amphitheatre” ended, as mentioned above, “Without seeing his killer’s face[,]” while “Without a Face” ends with “No animal would do that[,]” in reference to an animal’s moral inability to commit faceless murder. Often enough, it’s difficult to name pieces, but this process and sequence of titling sections off of pertinent content from a previous section allows Gospodinov freedom to address a myriad of topics while still sustaining the individuality of the sections, and still connecting them beyond their order in the mostly static medium of a physical book. Well done, Georgi.

The next section is aptly titled “No Animal Would Do That” and catalogs, statistically and philosophically, the advent of modern day meat production. This slaughter is further used to introduce the cross-generational vegetarianism is Gospodinov’s family in “A Tale of the Vegetarian Man-Eater” and “On the Eating of Flesh.” This approach to vegetarianism and mass murder is fresh to us at this point in the book, as we’ve only had glancing mentions to either, whether the moment where public defender Gospodinov reminded us that bulls are herbivores or the massive die-offs of birds, bats, and bees, respectively.

So as we make our way through The Physics of Sorrow we continue to see Gospodinov’s plan unfold. We start the see the cohesion with the disjointed pieces, and the ability for an age old myth to continue to be refreshed, and for his skill to re-approach topics from a dizzying amount of angles. At this point, we’re more than halfway through the piece. As much as I want to suggest that we have a sense of what is going to come next, I can only comfortably predict on the direction we’re headed—everything else is up to myth.